First News on 570 for Thursday, June 21st, 2018

posted by Mark Starling -

6:13- Bill Zimpfer- Developments on the Immigration issue are coming fast in Washington. Bill will have the latest on immigration, from both Congress and the White House.

6:43- William Mapp- Top Tech Stories of the Week

BITCOINS VIRTUALLY SAFE, UNLESS THEY AREN’T

Filed in audacious BitCoin news, hackers, stole one third, that’s a third, with a ’T’, of the BitCoins traded on South Korean BitCoin exchange, Coinrail. Coinrail didn’t give an official amount of the theft, but observers estimate 40 billion won of BitCoin was stolen by hackers. That’s 36 million dollars. Talk about a heist! If this is true, this makes the Coinrail Heist (I hung a name on it) the largest BitCoin theft in history. This latest theft sent BitCoin values down from $7500 before the weekend to $6,780 as of Monday. Coinrail is cooperating with police to find out who the thieves are. Before you ask, this theft doesn’t make BitCoin itself particularly vulnerable to theft, but it does raise questions about security of BitCoin exchanges. BTC wasn’t the only cryptocurrency stolen last weekend either. Pundi X, Aston, and NFER were also stolen. Yeah, I’m going to sink my cold hard cash into Pundi X.

AN END TO MEMES SIGNALS DARK DAY ON THE INTERNET

This week’s big story involves the European Union attempting to enforce a “link tax” on websites who link to news content from their site on third parties. The bill, ominously called Article 13 could put an end to memes, remixes, posted code, and a whole host of other user shared content. The law calls for aggregation and link sharing services such as Google and Facebook to pay the publishers of the original content a fee for the link. The law is obviously aimed at the hegemony of US tech companies to force them to pay, but the Internet’s largest luminaries including Tim-Berners Lee think it’s a terrible idea. Creative Commons, who promotes an open and free Internet are calling this the darkest day on the Internet.

IN SIGN HUMANS WILL AUTOMATED ANY JOB, PROJECT DEBATER WINS AGAINST HUMAN

Earlier this week, a new IBM AI, part of the Project Debater project (ha!), successfully debated a human being by rebutting her arguments, citing facts, and forming its responses in complete sentences. Something that our politicians can’t do. The AI drew its material from hundred of millions of newspaper articles and academic journals. It’s hard to say if the machine had any new ideas as it was drawing from human written material, but the fact the AI was able to counter a human being extemporaneously is impressive.

INSTAGRAM DEBUTS LONGAGRAM VIDEOS TO COMPETE AGAINST YOUTUBE

Facebook instant image and video network, Instagram is debuting a new social networking app that let’s users upload videos up to an hour long in their platform. The new app is designed to compete against YouTube and earn money in the low innovative ad-market space. The new service will be called IGTV and includes service programs featuring videos from celebrities and rising Internet stars. The service is teen focused since most teens don’t watch as much TV as their older cousins. The new app has boosted Facebook’s stock above $200 for the first time.